Category: Visual Aids

To hear Edward Tufte tell it, PowerPoint is a killer app that actually kills.

Truly.

He points to a poorly done PowerPoint presentation as a cause for the space shuttle Columbia disaster.  An author and former Yale professor, Tufte argues that the imprecise nature of PowerPoint glossed over the true cause of the disaster.  The presenters who analyzed the foam debris that caused the disaster, Tufte claims, were too imprecise by virtue of the use of PowerPoint.

If you’d like to hear Tufte rail against PowerPoint on NPR click here.

I’m no lover of PowerPoint.

But Tufte’s claims probably apply best to presentations of highly technical information in visual form. Looking at his website, you’ll see that the visuals he loves are often highly complicated themselves, though perhaps they’re accurate.

One has to wonder whether the average business person can really use his ideas. Or whether we’re just supposed to send in our money and buy his beautiful graphs and illustrations, frame them, and put them on our walls.

My Beef with PowerPoint

My complaint about PowerPoint is different than Tufte’s complaint.  PowerPoint is a perfectly fine program. It’s just used improperly.  Most people use it as a presentation creation tool when it’s actually a tool to illustrate presentations.

To create a presentation, you should first decide what are your two or three core messages. Then you should fill out what you’re going to say to illustrate those messages. Then you should decide how you’re going to illustrate those points.

Instead, people create their presentations by opening up PowerPoint and relying on the templates that the program provides. As a result, most PowerPoint presentations are painful outlines with lots of bullet points.

So, if you’re watching a bad presentation, you don’t blame PowerPoint. Blame the presenter.

A client recently sent over a deck of slides for a big presentation on leadership.  The first slide was a quotation from Jack Welch, the former GE Chairman. 

“My main job was developing talent. I was a gardener providing water and other nourishment to our top 750 people. Of course, I had to pull out some weeds, too.”

What a great quote! 

But what value do you add to the audience by putting it on the slide?  None. That’s why we advise our clients never to put quotes on slides.

Remember that the speaker is the most important visual; far more important than any slide.  You’re there as a leader to influence your audience with your ideas and your intensity. 

When you put a quotation on a slide, you undermine your presentation by diverting attention from you to the slide.

And you certainly don’t undermine the impact of the quotation by delivering it without the slide.  Indeed, we think it’s far more impactful to look at the audience and state the quote from memory, or if necessary from a cheat sheet.

Imagine this:

You come before you audience, with a blank screen. Here’s how you start.

We’re here today to discuss leadership training. And when we’re talking about this issue, I’m reminded of a quote from Jack Welch. He said, “My main job was developing talent. I was a gardener providing water and other nourishment to our top 750 people. Of course, I had to pull out some weeds, too.”

Now that’s the way to grab your audience’s attention.  Having your audience look at a slide while you read it to them won’t have near the impact.

By the way, if you’re looking for quotations to use in presentations try www.wikiquote.org.

 

If you don’t want people thinking that you’re Dilbert, don’t start creating presentation before you’ve come up with what you want to say.

Take out a blank sheet of paper and write down the three “bumper stickers” that you absolutely want your listeners to remember above all else. Then think about how you want to illustrate your presentation. It may be that you don’t even need slides.

I’ve apparently been labeled a PowerPoint hater among the public speaking blogosphere. 

Fellow public speaking blogger Olivia Mitchell recently spearheaded an interesting virtual debate on the value of PowerPoint. She quoted me here trashing the value of PowerPoint.

And I admit that I’m not a huge fan. But I’m not against the use of visuals. I just think that people focus so much on visuals that they forget their value. 

PowerPoint illustrates a presentation. But it doesn’t sell an idea. That is done by the speaker by keeping his message focused and delivering it with passion.

I think that people think that endless fiddling with slides will somehow make their presentation good. But it won’t. Only a focused message and rehearsal will do that.

If you want to read all the posts in the great PowerPoint the debate, click here.

One thing people that worry about when using PowerPoint is what to do when the light from the projector cuts the room in half.

 

You’ve seen the problem. Your projector is on a table at the front of the room and the light from the projector is shining on the screen such that you can’t walk across the front of the room without blinding yourself and briefly blocking the screen.

 

If you never cross in front of the light, you feel cut off from one side of the room and hence, half the audience.

 

The solution: Try to stay to one side for about half the time and then cross over in front of the light, moving quickly to ensure that you can connect with the other half of the room.